Wired vs Wireless Gaming Mouse Latency - Final Answer!

The click

latency

difference between a wide and

wireless

gaming

mouse

is the same, at least that's what we've been telling ourselves for the past few years, but today we'll see if that's actually true. Modern

gaming

mice use different sensors, different buttons. and most importantly, different firmware and software to sample that information, including different bounce times, and the real

answer

is yes, there is actually a measurable difference in click

latency

between the best gaming mice out there, especially between the main

wireless

contenders, in fact, when it comes to

mouse

latency maybe there are other factors here that are more important than just whether the mouse is wide or wireless, so I'm very excited to show you this test, let's take a look, so that what we are testing here is end-to-end latency, that is the time. that it takes a mouse click to register as an input on your screen, this means that we are also including many other factors in the chain, but since they are constant, we will be able to measure the difference between The changing variable, which is different gaming mice , also because we are measuring latency on a very lightweight desktop application and using a 360Hz monitor with one of the fastest PCs that can be built today, the rest of the latency in that chain is minimal .

We'll see, to measure latency we'll use the latest revision of ldap from nvidia, which is short for latency display analysis tool, this one actually has a microphone input, meaning that instead of relying on a wide connection between the mouse button and the ldap, as you can see here we can use an audio input instead, so with the microphone connected, the ldap listens for the mouse click, starts the timer and then waits for the input to record in the software in flash form now yes I think using audio as input here is an inaccurate and unreliable way of testing, don't worry because I did it too.

Until I compared the results between a

wired

connection and the audio input as a trigger, I found absolutely no difference in the average end-to-end latency between using the audio as a trigger versus a direct

wired

mouse button signal, so that the direct cable versus the audio as trigger we get exactly the same result, also since the distance between the mouse click and the microphone is only a few millimeters, we are only looking at a few microseconds for that sound to travel that short distance if We think these results make sense, also some quick tests on polling rates here to see how much of this will affect the following tests. the sample rate of the mouse, so it makes sense that higher polling rates result in lower latency, most gaming mice max out at a thousand hertz or one sample every millisecond, but others, such as the mouse ultra light 2

final

, are limited to 500hz, so testing with the g305 here I found a difference of about 1.6 milliseconds between the polling rate of 500 and 1000 hertz;

It's a measurable difference, although it's not a deal-breaker, with around an eight percent increase in end-to-end latency, so keep that in mind if you're choosing between mice that are locked to 500 hertz, but here's the graph We all want to see what the true click latency is of the best gaming mice out there, including wireless and wide ones. I think the first thing I want to point out here is the The fact that there is actually a measurable difference here is not as simple as they are all the same if we look at the bottom of the stack with 28.7 milliseconds of latency vs. the top of the stack with 14.9, which is almost a 14. millisecond difference, so an image that plays with an extra 14 milliseconds of network delay, for example, the worrying thing here is that it's 14 milliseconds at the start of the chain, which will affect how mouse clicks are recorded in the game, not just how they are displayed. that's very different from, for example, comparing 14 milliseconds of latency on monitors where it only affects the display, not the actual recorded input in a game like this, so to put 14 milliseconds into another perspective, if you play on a gaming monitor At 240Hz, your shots will be delayed by a little more than three frames, but let's start separating the stack here, highlighting the wireless gaming mice in wide and leaving the wired models in blue.

There really isn't a correlation between what is best for lower latency. Both have good and average performance as well. Turns out Razer's optical switches and their claims of industry-leading response times aren't a bunch of marketing nonsense after all, they actually managed to top the list here with the Razer Viper Mini and Viper Ultimate on the same note , this is exactly why a glorified default out-of-the-box or wireless model works towards the bottom of the stack, this is because the wireless or model has an exceptionally long out-of-the-box bounce time of 10 milliseconds d-bounce is a feature that forces a signal delay on the mouse to avoid double-clicking something that Razer has managed to get past due to its optical switch design, it can improve the latency result on the wireless model by reducing the debounce setting in its software and here we can see that that has a pretty significant impact on reducing latency, even setting it to zero milliseconds.

I didn't experience any double clicks in my tests, so I would recommend trying to hit those lower

final

values, so now substitute that new result for glorious, we're close to one. millisecond behind the Logitech G Pro another question: what happens when a wireless mouse connects well? As expected, click latency improves slightly, but it's a fairly small difference. The wireless connection on the G Pro so I think we would all agree that the freedom of wireless far outweighs the benefits of having a half millisecond reduction in click latency. I will also mention that I am a little disappointed with pwnage despite giving this mouse a great review, this result shows that the software and firmware team can do much better, specifically the anti-bounce adjustment slider in their software, which I found not does absolutely nothing.

I tried both ends of the slider and the default middle and got exactly the same result each time I still rate the mouse pretty well, I think the shape and customization are pretty good but the software and settings are really lacking here which is Disappointing to find some really interesting results here and if you're someone who was hesitant to jump into a wireless gaming mouse for fear of higher click latency and I know there are many of you out there, this just goes to show that that's no longer something you should be looking for. worry; In fact, some of the fastest gaming microphones on this list were actually wireless, but also with a There are plenty of wireless gaming microphones coming out from smaller brands like pwnage.

I'd be interested to see what the latency results look like there as well. As a disclaimer, I still think mouse shape, size, weight, and feel are the most important elements in finding the best. The gaming mouse is for you, but I'm super excited to feature this new test item in upcoming gaming mouse reviews, so definitely stay tuned if you haven't already, hit the subscribe button below, as always , Thanks so much for looking. and I'll see you all in the next one